


By the Falls of Imladris

by Avia_Isadora



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: F/M, Old Friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-15 03:27:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29677710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Avia_Isadora/pseuds/Avia_Isadora
Summary: Galadriel isn't a bit fooled by Gandalf's pretended surprise that Thorin Oakenshield has left Rivendell.  But then she's known him a long time.
Relationships: Galadriel | Artanis/Gandalf | Mithrandir
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	By the Falls of Imladris

The night was dark, the last lamps extinguished, scudding clouds overcasting moon and stars. A few lights gleamed above in the hall by the fire, liquid notes of a single harp falling like water in the darkness, a lone musician loath to seek his or her bed. It was dark, and still she knew his step, felt his presence as he hesitated in the archway behind her.

"Mithrandir."

"My dear lady."

"You did not leave this morning with Thorin Oakenshield," she observed, glancing sideways at him past the ruff of her cloak of white sable as he came to stand by her over the dizzying drop to the falls beneath.

"Er, no," he replied, simple truth that masked the more complicated answer. It would not have done, of course. Not when the head of his order had all but forbade him to assist the dwarves. And yet she had no doubt that as soon as it was possible he would plead some excuse and be off into the wild, following after Thorin's party with all possible haste.

"You are right to aid him," Galadriel said.

At that his expression changed, eyes warming. "And why do you say that?"  
"A feeling. No more." Her smile might have been arch, if elves ten thousand years old did such things.

"Ah," he said. There was laughter in his eyes now. "More profound than a hundred pearls of wisdom are the feelings of the Lady of Lothlorien."

She did laugh, standing close enough their shoulders almost touched, of a height with one another. "You are a flatterer."

"I pay tribute where it is due." He inclined his head, but he was smiling. This was an old dance, and she stretched out her hand so that he took it, her first two fingers closed in his. They were warm, and even the baths of Imladris had not soaked the last traces of dirt from them.

"Your hands are dirty," she said.

"I fear so." He didn't sound contrite at all, and how should he? His business was getting his hands dirty, meddling in the affairs of the world. He never stood back from what could be done.

She took a deep breath. The air was pure and clear as always, the night scented with blooming flowers and filled with music. The walks were swept clean, every plant tended. There was no soot on the carefully maintained chimneys. The water ran without impediment, plunging to the torrent below.

"It is so easy," Galadriel mused, "to say, wait for a season. Wait for a year, or ten or a century. So easy, when you are as old as we, to feel that time hardly passes."

"And yet it does," Mithrandir said. "Out in the world there are many without a century to wait, and time is not kind to them. In a century, generations live and die."

She looked at him, twisting her fingers in his. "How do you do it? How do you remain in the present when each day blends into the one before and after?"  
He huffed, his eyes straying to the water as though he sought the words. "I suppose through people," he said. "Through attending to them and seeing them change. Watching them grow up and have children and their children have children. By touching them from cradle to grave." He paused a moment, then went on. "By loving the world and everything in it. It plants me, secure as roots in the dirt. But then you know something about desiring the world."

And she had. She had desired the world with a brilliant passion, the strange and ever-changing, untidy and convoluted mess that was Arda, the World That Is, far from the peace of western lands. She had loved it from the icebound harbors of the north to the bright towers of Gondolin, lands that were now beneath the sea. She had loved the lands untrod and the peoples she had met there, men and dwarves and those who had rejected the Journey, preferring the wild to the promise of paradise. She loved those frail flames against the dark, the songs to stars that weren't personally known to them. She had loved all this with a passion unbecoming, a raging desire for the underworld that is mortal lands.

"Ah," she said, "But you came here out of the desire to help others. I came here in my rebellion and pride."

His mouth twitched. "You can't say you haven't had fun."

At that she laughed and put her head upon his shoulder, his cheek against her brow. "I have," she said.

"Well then."

"Perhaps one day I will return to Manwë's halls. Perhaps I will go to the Halls of Weeping. But not today."

"Not today," he said, and raised his hand to her golden hair. "Not today, fire-bright Lady of the Elves."

She kissed his dirt-stained knuckles.


End file.
